The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Read online

  ALSO EDITED BY ANN AND JEFF VANDERMEER

  The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (with Mark Roberts)

  Best American Fantasy 1 (with Matthew Cheney)

  Best American Fantasy 2 (with Matthew Cheney)

  The New Weird

  Steampunk

  Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded

  Fast Ships, Black Sails

  The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

  Last Drink Bird Head

  ODD?

  The Weird

  The Time Traveler’s Almanac

  Sisters of the Revolution

  The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals

  The Big Book of Science Fiction

  ALSO BY JEFF VANDERMEER

  FICTION

  The Southern Reach Trilogy

  Annihilation

  Authority

  Acceptance

  Dradin in Love

  The Book of Lost Places (stories)

  Veniss Underground

  City of Saints and Madmen

  Secret Life (stories)

  Shriek: An Afterword

  The Situation

  Finch

  The Third Bear (stories)

  Borne

  The Strange Bird

  NONFICTION

  Why Should I Cut Your Throat?

  Booklife

  Monstrous Creatures

  The Steampunk Bible (with S. J. Chambers)

  The Steampunk User’s Manual (with Desirina Boskovich)

  Wonderbook

  ALSO BY ANN VANDERMEER

  Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

  The Bestiary

  A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, JULY 2019

  Introduction and compilation copyright © 2019 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Owing to limitations of space, permissions to reprint previously published material appear starting on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: VanderMeer, Ann, editor, writer of introduction. | VanderMeer, Jeff, editor, writer of introduction.

  Title: The big book of classic fantasy : the ultimate collection / edited and with an introduction by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

  Description: New York : Vintage Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018038439 (print) | LCCN 2018060576 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525435570 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525435563 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PN6071.F25 (ebook) | LCC PN6071.F25 B535 2019 (print) | DDC 808.83/8766—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018038439

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525435563

  Ebook ISBN 9780525435570

  Cover design by Joe Montgomery

  Cover engraving: Peregrinations of a Comet by Grandville. Photograph © Selva/Bridgeman Images

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.4

  ep

  For Hans-My-Hedgehog

  Contents

  Cover

  Also Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

  The Queen’s Son by Bettina von Arnim

  Hans-My-Hedgehog by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

  The Story of the Hard Nut by E.T.A. Hoffmann

  Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

  The Luck of the Bean-Rows by Charles Nodier

  Transformation by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  The Nest of Nightingales by Théophile Gautier

  The Fairytale About a Dead Body, Belonging to No One Knows Whom by Vladimir Odoevsky

  The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton by Charles Dickens

  The Nose by Nikolai Gogol

  The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe

  The Story of Jeon Unchi by Anonymous

  Feathertop: A Moralized Legend by Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Master Zacharius by Jules Verne

  The Frost-King: Or, The Power of Love by Louisa May Alcott

  The Tartarus of Maids by Herman Melville

  The Magic Mirror by George MacDonald

  The Diamond Lens by Fitz-James O’Brien

  Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

  The Will-o’-the-Wisps Are in Town by Hans Christian Andersen

  The Legend of the Pale Maiden by Aleksis Kivi

  Looking-Glass House by Lewis Carroll

  Furnica, or the Queen of the Ants by Carmen Sylva

  The Story of Iván the Fool by Leo Tolstoy

  The Goophered Grapevine by Charles W. Chestnutt

  The Bee-Man of Orn by Frank R. Stockton

  The Remarkable Rocket by Oscar Wilde

  The Ensouled Violin by H. P. Blavatskaya

  The Death of Odjigh by Marcel Schwob

  The Terrestrial Fire by Marcel Schwob

  The Kingdom of Cards by Rabindranath Tagore

  The Other Side: A Breton Legend by Count Eric Stanlislaus Stenbock

  The Fulness of Life by Edith Wharton

  Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady by Vernon Lee

  The Little Room by Madeline Yale Wynne

  The Plattner Story by H. G. Wells

  The Princess Baladina—Her Adventure by Willa Cather

  The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame

  Iktomi Tales by Zitkala-Ša

  Marionettes by Louis Fréchette

  Dance of the Comets: An Astral Pantomime in Two Acts by Paul Scheerbart

  The White People by Arthur Machen

  Blamol by Gustav Meyrink

  Goblins: A Logging Camp Story by Louis Fréchette

  Sowbread by Grazia Deledda

  The Angry Street by G. K. Chesterton

  The Aunt and Amabel by E. Nesbit

  Sacrifice by Aleksey Remizov

  The Princess Steel by W. E. B. Du Bois

  The Hump by Fernán Caballero

  The Celestial Omnibus by E. M. Forster

  The Legend of the Ice Babies by E. Pauline Johnson

  The Last Redoubt by William Hope Hodgson

  Jack Pumpkinhead and the Sawhorse by L. Frank Baum

  The Plant Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Strange News from Another Star by Hermann Hesse

  The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

  The Hoard of the Gibbelins by Lord Dunsany

  Through the Dragon Glass by A. Merritt

  David Blaize and the Blue Door
by E. F. Benson

  The Big Bestiary of Modern Literature by Franz Blei

  The Alligator War by Horacio Quiroga

  Friend Island by Francis Stevens

  Magic Comes to a Committee by Stella Benson

  Gramophone of the Ages by Yefim Zozulya

  Joiwind by David Lindsay

  Sound in the Mountain by Maurice Renard

  Sennin by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

  Koshtra Pivrarcha by E. R. Eddison

  At the Border by Der Nister

  The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan by W. B. Laughead

  Talkative Domovoi by Aleksandr Grin

  The Ratcatcher by Aleksandr Grin

  The Shadow Kingdom by Robert E. Howard

  The Man Traveling with the Brocade Portrait by Edogawa Ranpo

  A Visit to the Museum by Vladimir Nabokov

  The Water Sprite’s Tale by Karel Čapek

  The Capital of Cat Country by Lao She

  Coyote Stories by Mourning Dove

  Uncle Monday by Zora Neale Hurston

  Rose-Cold, Moon Skater by María Teresa León

  A Night of the High Season by Bruno Schulz

  The Influence of the Sun by Fernand Dumont

  The Town of Cats by Hagiwara Sakutarō

  The Debutante by Leonora Carrington

  The Jewels in the Forest by Fritz Leiber

  Evening Primrose by John Collier

  The Coming of the White Worm by Clark Ashton Smith

  The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls by Marcel Aymé

  Leaf by Niggle by J. R. R. Tolkien

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

  About the Translators

  About the Editors

  Introduction

  WILD DELIGHTS

  IMAGINE BEING USHERED into a vast and palatial room on a sumptuous estate that rivals Versailles…and across from you on a golden table lies a smorgasbord of delights. A banquet fit for a king, a queen, or even an emperor. As you gaze upon this wonder, you’re told you may partake of this magical repast for only one many-course dinner. After which, you will be ushered from the estate, from the enchanted gardens that surround it, with the little glints at dusk that might be fireflies or might be fairies. You will leave, never to return, left only with the memory of the most amazing meal you have ever eaten.

  A banquet such as this could be said to be the dilemma of any anthologist, but especially ours when compiling The Big Book of Classic Fantasy. Defining “classic,” as from the early 1800s to World War II—from the start of a nascent idea of “fantasy” as opposed to “folktale” to the moment before the rise of a commercial category of “fantasy”—one is still left with more than a century of fantastical stories. A feast almost beyond measure! But how to gorge oneself without getting sick? (Even with a larder as large as this book, there are limits.) How to sample as much as one can without feeling slightly dissatisfied at not getting bigger bites of particular favorites? What to bring back, then, for readers, that isn’t just the editors glutting themselves on their own particular tastes? How to be representative? Not everyone wants a steady diet of Turkish delight, even if it is accompanied by talking animals and a magical closet.

  In short, the period in question was rich, deep, and wild for literature, and there is an inclination in even the most disciplined curator to succumb to that wildness and favor the word “treasury” over “anthology,” to relinquish focus for a family-style buffet free-for-all. Yet the best meals are curated to some extent. They have a beginning, middle, and end. You remember them because of the selection of ingredients and the care with which they were put together. Thus, our decision has been to sample in such a way as to showcase certain themes and schools of thought while not forgetting that wonderful nostalgia for the fantasy treasuries of our collective childhood.

  This predilection for a certain loosening of the reins of curation dovetails with the unpredictable nature of the period in question for fantasy. Fantasy, pre–World War II, often wasn’t described as such, except, perhaps in the rise of pulp magazines like Weird Tales in the 1930s. Lawless, profound, visionary, phantasmagorical, these stories often eluded classification altogether on publication. Some were so personal, they were written before World War II but only discovered after (one, at least, published here for the first time). Fantasy grappled with or offered escape from some of the most horrific vistas of war and nascent industrialization and rubbed shoulders with formal new movements like surrealism, while at the same time navigating a difficult path out of the mythic by shedding or sublimating religious imagery and themes. (Which is to say, “fantasy” was like most other forms of literature during this time of vast upheaval and change.)

  Whether it was fairy tales that contained warnings about real-life perils (at the time; most readers will not feel particularly threatened by giant hedgehogs these days) or the influence of the prior contes philosophiques, in which scientists presented their extrapolations in the form of dream journeys or quests, the beauty and dexterity of what would come to be termed “fantasy” became more fully formed during this era. The ideological war or debate over the value of non-realist fiction, including fantasy, would begin during the end of the period. The rise of pulp magazines gave writers in the United Kingdom and United States a home for work that couldn’t be published elsewhere, even as pulp’s own restrictions gave readers an incomplete (and often Anglo) idea of both the definition of and uses of fantasy.

  None of this wildness or freedom means that writers of fantastical fiction were any less immune with regard to conveying racism or sexism. The world’s first fantasy magazine, the Orchid Garden (established 1919 in Austria), published stories that have stood the test of time…but in a context of racist illustrations and at least one editor and contributor who later became a Nazi. Even some first-wave feminists (for example, the then-popular Mary Elizabeth Counselman) could be an example to white women while in her stories crafting depictions of African Americans that were based on the worst stereotypes. Today, many of these stories are simply unreadable. Some of the omissions in this anthology occur for this reason.

  However, as our selection shows, the creative minds writing short stories in the fantasy realm were more global and diverse than many past tables of contents may have suggested. As is alas ever true: editors can sometimes be more conservative than the period they cover. Inasmuch as we had a guiding principle, it was to push against conservative choices, within the range of material available. Thus, you will find many unusual and rare dishes among the banquet set out before you.

  THE RATE OF THE “FEY” AS A BAROMETER FOR FANTASY

  For purposes of this anthology, “fantasy” means any story in which an element of the unreal permeates the real world or any story that takes place within a secondary world that is identifiably not a version of ours, whether anything overtly “fantastical” occurs during the story. Beyond these basic parameters, fantasy is distinguished from horror or the weird in that fantasy isn’t primarily concerned with the creation of terror or the exploration of an altered state of being frightened, alienated, or fascinated by an eruption of the uncanny.

  “Classic fantasy,” then, is that naive state of the unreal during which writers largely did not self-identify their work as “fantasy,” during a transitional period that also loosely corresponds to the transition in history from religion to science and from agrarian, rural societies to industrialized, urban societies. This period also saw a marked devaluation of fantasy as for children, culminating in an association with the low cultural status of the pulp magazines.

  Within this context, we searched for a useful word or phrase to further define “fantasy,” much as science fiction has “sense of wonder,�
�� and “the uncanny” serves to support the weird. For us, that term is “the fey,” a concept eight hundred years old and most commonly associated with fairies and a kind of twilit, magical meadow that blends “sense of wonder” and “uncanny” in a fantastical context.

  Generalizations can be dangerous, but as editors we do have to make certain assertions, even if these just constitute scaffolding or an approximation. (Strict definers will, of course, be horrified by our unwillingness to euthanize the butterfly of taxonomy and pin it to a killing board.)

  In this context, we can say that a fantasy story can be further defined by a wildness or an unease or ethereal alienness that emanates from the fey. The dictionary definition of “the fey” is “otherworldliness,” which encapsulates how the most original fantasy seeks to elude locked-in, binary readings. “The rate of fey” (our construct) in fantasy provides some measure of whether a story is (1) escapist/non-escapist, (2) rational/irrational, or (3) employing familiar or unique symbolism. “Fey” also pertains to how much a fantasy story borrows from horror fiction or weird fiction. A high rate of fey, or strangeness, tends to fold in elements of horror or the weird because unfamiliarity creates unease and sometimes terror in the reader. In fact, many of the strangest fairy stories could also be classified as horror stories.